Philippa Dell, BSc(Hons), PGCE

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My interests lie in the ecology and conservation of cetaceans (marine mammals), and the socio-economic barriers to wildlife conservation.

After volunteering through the Born Free Foundation on a wildlife reserve in South Africa, I went on to complete a BSc in Zoology at Durham University in 2009. During my degree I participated in a final year zoological fieldwork placement in South Africa, and volunteered for two months on a wildlife conservation project in Indonesian Borneo.

After graduating from Durham, I worked for two years as a Research Assistant with the Tethys Research Institute on a dolphin research project in the Gulf of Corinth in Greece, where I studied the abundance and behavioural ecology of the striped, common, and bottlenose dolphin populations in the gulf. From there I went to work as a Research Assistant on a project in New Zealand, studying the feeding ecology of Hector's dolphins in the area of Banks Peninsula.

At the end of 2013, I established a collaboration between the Tethys Research Institute and the University of Exeter, where I had been accepted as an MPhil candidate with Dr Samantha Hurn in the field of Anthrozoology. My MPhil is an interdisciplinary study of the social-ecological factors involved in anthropogenic noise disturbance of cetaceans in the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals in the Ligurian Sea. My research combines fieldwork at sea collecting acoustic and behavioural data, with shore-based fieldwork conducting qualitative interviews with representatives from maritime industries operating in the Pelagos Sanctuary.